Slumrat Rising

Three spells to choose from. First- Earth Folding Step. Direct combat utility was… more than zero, but not a big number. More tactical than direct damage. The ability to instantly close and retreat would be an enormous edge, as would the ability to directly scram out of combat. Or run down fleeing targets. Actually, it would also make your ambush range ridiculous. Launching an assault from outside their patrol range was very spicy indeed. As was the strategic effect. He was a nightmare to pin down, but evading roadblocks was already hard and likely to get harder. With this, he could just walk right past them.

Then there was the Doomsday Book. This was, to his way of thinking, a real change in lifestyle. If he did actually want to lead a revolution, this was the number one, no question, top pick. To have a mental catalog of everyone you have met, their connections… immensely useful. There were a lot of business spells that did similar, of course. Even his… servant… Niles had a spell like that. This sounded a bit more profound. Not just mental catalogs but webs of meanings. Guiding him to make connections that might otherwise be invisible. Would it be compatible with Incisive? The possibilities were astonishing.

Lastly was Thunderchild. He was instantly enchanted by it. The sudden explosion of energy, of speed and power! He already moved amongst the masses like a ghost. How much sweeter would it be to do the same with powerhouses? His battles would be one sided slaughters. And, sure, he would have to run like Hell afterwards to find a safe place to hide out for a few days, but to strike as quick and hard as lightning? To move faster than thought? To be a child of celestial thunder upon the battlefield? He could feel the shiver running down his spine. The spell was called Thunderchild, but in his hands, he would be a War God.

Three very different spells. One mobility spell, one managerial, and one offensive. Each multifaceted, with enormous requirements to use, and even more enormous growth potential. And each would need to be immediately dropped into a spell slot. No experimentation would be possible here. They were just too big and too hard to learn. So he would have to choose, now, in this room, how he wanted his soul to grow.

“Funny. Ever since I learned about Nascent Souls I-” His eyes flicked up. “Did the lights just flicker?”

“Yes.” Merkovah glanced around and quickly pulled out an obsidian mirror. He made a few passes over it with his hand, then shook his head.

“I wondered before, but I think it’s confirmed now. The taboo is still in effect. Maybe not as powerfully as it once was, but it is still there. I would strongly advise not testing the limits of it. Especially anywhere a bolt of lightning could easily reach you.”

“I’ll do that.” Truth nodded fervently.

“Besides, I think I can guess what you were trying to say. I have been doing some very high speed self reflection since you explained it. We all did, I think. It changes a great deal. Perhaps not everything, and there is a real question about causation in there, but it certainly changes how we as teachers must think about our tuition.”

They both fell into reverie for a moment. “I keep thinking of the kids in my technical highschool. They would have learned the Jeon Universal Spell, all of them. I don’t know that modern magic is a permanent bar to developing… to the next level… but I have to imagine it makes it a lot harder. Makes the… thing… a lot weaker. But that’s not the worst of it.”

Merkovah tapped the table softly. “The worst of it is that it makes you etch your soul with a single truth- ‘I am fungible. I am a completely interchangeable part in the stream of industry, and my value is determined by the person using me. I am only valuable because I am not unique or special.’”

“Almost every major country has a similar spell, doesn’t it?”

“Yes, and always have, as far as I know. For once, that’s not a Starbrite ‘innovation.’”

They lapsed back into silence. After a few minutes, Truth spoke first.

“I mean, we always knew every spell changes who you are, in a manner of speaking. It changes how you approach problems. In Jeon, it was like gravity- you were your spell which was also your job. Nobody needed an explanation for the obvious. It just was.”

“And then someone goes and figures out the math behind orbits, and it turns out there was infinitely more “there” there.” Merkovah’s mouth twitched into a quarter-smile.

They lapsed back into silence.

“Take off your hats for a moment.” Truth stirred, leaning forward. “Your spymaster hat, teacher hat, whatever hats. Which would you choose? Who would you want to be?”

“None of the above.” The answer was instant.

“Eh? You have spells that fill these gaps already?”

“Somewhat, but more to the point, they are never who I wanted to be when I was a young man. I have two slots left. I have known what they would be for centuries. After today, that changes. Should I survive this final conflagration, they will be totally different.” His voice was vehement.

“Oh? What do you want to be, Teacher?”

Unauthorized duplication: this narrative has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

“I want to heal the world. Not out of some benevolence, but sheer selfish nostalgia. I want to restore the mountains and rivers to how they were when I was young. See them teeming with spirits and demons. See trees offering fruits that were literally the stuff of magic itself. Recreate a world of infinite wonders. Pausing only to crucify every damned industrialist, factory farm operator and off-world exporter I meet.”

“I had no idea.”

“Did you know that coffee grows wild in Siphios? It’s been cultivated since forever, but it’s originally a wild tree. You could go out into your backyard and harvest the cherries yourself. Now, our best farmland grows nothing but coffee. Specially selected and bred to make inoffensive, shelf stable offerings for the export market.”

“A soul that cannot let go of the past. A soul that wants to preserve and create new life, that the past will never die.” Truth’s voice was soft.

“Yes. I don’t deny it. I’m, hah, God’s own conservative. I long for what I know was a better time, and will work tirelessly to bring it back.”

“Except you are tired.”

The exorcist nodded, almost burying his face in his beard. “Beyond words. Beyond words.”

The silence lapsed again. Who did he want to be? Loneliness had defined so much of his life. Paranoia was ingrained in his bones. Doomsday Book would ensure he knew, in every intimate detail, the people he met. With time, he would know more about them than they did. He wouldn’t have to fear them. Not really. But would he really be less lonely? When you don’t see a person but a bundle of connections?

He looked at Merkovah, and he saw a mentor, a teacher, a spymaster, a patriot, a demon summoner, an exorcist… all the hats and labels and tags connecting the beardy wonder to thousands of other things. Would the spell really change that much? For that matter, was Merkovah, with all his centuries of watching friends and students die, lonely? He must be. All those connections couldn’t prevent that.

Truth was already a top tier combatant. He took pride in his abilities there. The universe rarely punished someone for being too good at fighting. Besides, always having a hole card like Thunderchild was a very comforting thought. He might get into bad jams, but he would have a way to get out again. If he truly needed to. He would always have a “Win then go home” spell to fall back on. That was a shocking thing.

Violence had always gone hand in hand with loneliness and paranoia, of course. All those beatings he caught because he hadn’t seen them coming and avoided them. Or that were unavoidable. Or that he dished out to others, to make his life better. It hadn’t been a happy life. He was good at violence, and he was proud of his skills, but he couldn’t say that it had really made him happy. Not when his life was viewed in its totality. His Rough Patron said violence would be an inescapable part of his life but. Well. People had told him a lot of things over the years. Amazing how many of those things turned out to be wrong.

Truth sighed and picked up the Earth Folding step. Merkovah raised an eyebrow.

“Why that one?”

“Because when I think about my life, the happiest I have ever been was racing around the Free State on my iron horse, and traveling with you, Etenesh and Jember. Even now, I really enjoy seeing the different parts of Jeon, seeing Onis, trying new foods, and hearing new music. There are all kinds of practical reasons too, but that’s the biggest thing.”

He smiled. It crept across his face, as though a little shy about being so open. “I like to travel. How could I turn down a spell that lets me roam as I please?”

Merkovah nodded slowly. “I thought you might go for it, though honestly, my money had been on Thunderchild.”

Truth held up his thumb and index, a bare millimeter apart.

“It does suit you. Completely ignores the boundaries set by the other humans and the world itself. As you progress to higher levels, you will be able to step through walls, through mountains, even. Or so the spell claims. I’ve never seen it done.”

“Incredible!”

“And, of course, it’s another reality manipulating spell.”

“It is?” Truth thought about it for a moment. “Of course it is.”

Merkovah gave him a sardonic look. “‘I am over here, but if I take a single step, I am over there. Somewhere in between here and there, at some point in that step, reality has changed.’” He shook his head.

“To be clear, you don’t vanish from this reality and pop up again elsewhere. As best we can tell, you remain here and travel through the same space that everyone else inhabits. It’s just that, for you, the intervening obstacles between “Here” and “There,” including but not limited to distance itself, are simply temporarily abolished. Suspended, perhaps, but only for you. The fact that this also includes other people is frankly alarming.”

“I can see that. This sounds stupidly powerful. Is this another one of those “All the high levels have this spell, the juniors just don’t know about it,” things?”

“No. This is “Anyone not real enough and without enough magic power reserves trying this turns into something quite hard to look at, and harder still to describe without advanced mathematics and a strong stomach.”

“Not… real enough?”

Merkovah spread his hands. “You know that, as a rule, the more cosmic energy is in something, the more “real” it is. You also know, or ought to know, that two people at the same level may not have the same amount of cosmic energy in them. The size of the apertures, how much energy their body can hold, any body cultivation they may have done, special potions, inherited bloodlines, these things all have an effect.”

“Sure. I know I hold a lot more energy than most.”

“Yes, shockingly so. But I am forcing myself not to investigate, so let's move along swiftly. The short version? You can be high enough level to cast this spell, but still not real enough to survive the process of altering reality around you. You just lack that energy density. Likewise, you lack the reserves in your apertures to bull through any resistance you encounter.”

“But since I have a TON of energy, and I have been practicing the Meditations of Valentinian which do nothing but reinforce my own reality…”

“You ever see a tiger with wings?” Merkovah smiled like he was watching Harban burn already.

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